Valentine

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-63

Pages 64-127

Pages 128-193

Pages 194-245

Pages 246-306

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Character Analysis

Gloria Ramírez

As the story opens, Gloria is beaten and raped by Dale. What begins as a police procedural about the violation and brutal assault on a 14-year-old girl turns into a psychological study of this girl and the women who support her. The first generation of her Mexican family born in the US, Gloria feels displaced, growing up without a sense of roots or heritage, a stranger in a strange land without the comforts of her family. Her relationship with her mother is confrontational at best, volatile at worst. Gloria lacks the security of identity. She resists school, distrusts kids her own age, and rages against any implication of rules. She swears and is constantly mouthing off. She flips people off. She skips school. She smokes. Her favorite song is Patti Smith’s “Horses” with the refrain, “Jesus died for somebody’s sin, but not mine. My sins only belong to me” (6). She is hanging out at the Sonic on Valentine’s Day night after another fight with her mother. She wants to rebel but isn’t sure what or whom to rebel against. She gets into Dale’s pickup truck for no particular reason, having “nothing to lose, everything to gain” (7).

The rape significantly alters her sense of identity. Initially, she loses her independence. For weeks she hides in a hotel with her uncle, uncertain of who or what she has become. Her decision to change her name from Gloria to Glory indicates her sense of evolution. No longer a daring carefree rebel without a clue, she’s scared and sleeps with a pocketknife. In the end, as she and her uncle head back to Mexico to reclaim her roots and her family, Glory (the name that now suggests emotional and psychological redemption) has a showdown with a gargantuan rattlesnake that reveals her growth. Clutching her pocketknife, she admits to a time when she would have automatically, angrily struck out at the snake. She sees, however, that the snake is pregnant and is weakened by the experience, so she leaves the mother snake to her fast-approaching delivery. This is the new Glory: She learns the importance of others, the need to trust family, the wisdom of thinking before acting, and most importantly the glory of survival. She is determined now to write her own story.

Mary Rose Whitehead

The pregnant wife who helps the bloody and beaten Gloria the morning after her rape, Mary Rose wrestles with her maternal instinct in a story that investigates the complex role of women in the smothering patriarchal world of West Texas. In this world, girls either get out of Odessa or stay and get pregnant, have babies, and make a joyless commitment to the expected role of wife and mother.

For Mary Rose, maternal instinct means compassionate caring for kids, all kids, because of their helplessness and vulnerability. She can’t not open the door that morning. She must protect the beaten child—and she uses her perpetually loaded Winchester to make her case. That she pays dearly for her compassion reveals how the close-knit culture of West Texas dismisses the complexity of a mother as irrelevant. Her ostracism reveals her strength. She won’t be dissuaded from testifying. Even her husband doesn’t support her. Her testimony, which goes badly, centers on her conviction that although neither Gloria nor Dale said the word “rape,” in her heart, through her maternal instinct, she understood what had happened to that girl. She refuses to back down in court: When Dale sneers what to her is so obviously a threat, she responds in kind: “I will look forward to blowing your fucking head off” (233).

Her collapse into a sort of delusional anxiety after the verdict is a Shakespearean descent into near madness as she careens after Jesse, certain that the man with D.A. is Dale. Confused, angry, desperate to strike out at something to right what she sees as a deep and profound wrong, she takes a shot at Jesse, which marks her emotional nadir: “I want to kill someone” (263), she tells Corrine. In the end, Mary Rose needs others. Only Corrine’s support eases Mary Rose: “You’re not alone,” Corrine tells the weeping Mary Rose as she carefully lifts the gun out of her friend’s hand. In the end, as with the other women in the story, Mary Rose finds her deepest strength in embracing others.

Corrine Shepard

When we first meet Corrine, she’s hungover, astride her toilet, throwing up, and uncertain about exactly how much she had to drink the night before. It’s easy to feel sorry for the bourbon-soaked, 60-ish retired schoolteacher. Certain that her husband of more than 30 years would outlive her, she wasn’t ready for his speechlessly quick spiral after a cancer diagnosis. His suicide, which he staged ostensibly for her benefit (to spare her the indignities of his last weeks yet keep his insurance intact), leaves her at once despondent and uncertain, stony and still. She quotes her favorite Emily Dickinson lines, “This is the moment of lead / Remembered, if outlived / As Freezing persons, recollect snow” (116).

Now, lost and self-medicating with bourbon, she can’t even bring herself, nearly six weeks after her husband’s suicide, to go through his clothes. She sits in his pickup truck in the garage trying to summon the courage to turn on the ignition and be done with everything—but doesn’t. With her grown daughter living far away in Alaska, Corrine hesitatingly reaches out to Mary Rose when she moves in across the street. In opening up to another, Corrine comes at last to see the futility of her drinking. As she follows Mary Rose out to her confrontation with Jesse Belden, Corrine wrestles with the itch for a drink but won’t abandon her determination to help her friend despite how her entire face aches and her hands tremble—and despite that “knot rising in her forehead” (257).

At the same time, she forges an awkward friendship with the misfit neighborhood girl D.A. Pierce, finding in that relationship a kind of surrogate mother role. In the end, she saves Jesse Belden, redeems Mary Rose from her demons, and offers D.A. a reassuring and stable presence (as D.A.’s mother abandoned the family month earlier). Loneliness, heartache, and loss can’t destroy Corrine’s heart. As her last name suggests, she cares for others. Her credo is at once simple and heartfelt: “We don’t want anybody to suffer more than they need to” (265).

Debra Ann Pierce

In any other circumstances than in a novel that focuses so baldly on the brutal rape of a 14-year-old, the relationship that develops between 10-year-old D.A. Pierce and the emotionally damaged Vietnam veteran Jesse Belden might seem sweet in a fractured fairy-tale way: Once upon a time there was an independent young girl, lonely in spirit, desperate for someone, anyone, to care about. That Jesse is nearly twice her age, however, gives the unfolding story of their improbable friendship the uneasy feeling that tragedy lurks ahead. However, that isn’t the case, as Mary Rose’s confused chase of Jesse Belden reveals.

As in so many children’s fairy tales, D.A. saves adults from their own shattered hearts. An innocent on the threshold of inevitably discovering the complicated agonies and dark ironies of the too-adult world of the Permian Base, where girls grow into adolescence and either run away or stay in Odessa and get pregnant, D.A. still believes “that nothing bad can happen as long as she steps between cracks in the sidewalk” (69). She’s abandoned by her mother but refuses to accept that as anything but temporary, keeping the house neat and anticipating her mother’s return. Initially, D.A.’s constant visits to Corrine Shepard infuriate the widow, who wants only to drink alone.

Like most children would, D.A. has neither the ability to understand the emotional mess she has been asked to handle nor the perception to sympathize with the emotional pain of others. Her decision, which she makes almost without thinking, to befriend Jesse—who lives in a drainpipe and has only a feral cat for a friend—marks the depth of her hunger for another and her yearning selflessness. She brings him food and keeps him company. They share stories. They find their way, improbably enough, to a friendship that in the end brings about her emotional rescue. As in so many fairy tales, the misfit helps someone find his way home—and, in so doing, finds her own way home in her friendship with another emotionally damaged misfit, Corrine Shepard. At the end, Corrine lovingly, gently bathes the girl, ready to be for her a kind of surrogate mother. “From, now on,” Corrine tells her, “you can come over any time […] and I will always answer the door” (265).